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In June, 2012, hundreds of homes in Mountain Shadows, Colorado, a subdivision in the foothills of the Rockies, were reduced to ash during the wind-whipped Waldo Canyon Fire. On a cul-de-sac called Hot Springs Court, however, four dwellings somehow remained standing. The mystery of their survival nagged at Alex Maranghides, a fire-protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who worked with several colleagues on a meticulous reconstruction of the fire. How did the homes make it through? Was there something special about them—a fireproof roof, say, or a fancy sprinkler system?

The team collected weather reports, topographic data, G.P.S. records from fire engines, photos, videos, and property-damage reports. They debriefed more than two hundred witnesses, mostly first responders. After a hundred and fifty “technical discussions,” Maranghides finally met two firefighters from Northern California who were able to explain the miracle at Hot Springs Court. Their crew had parked their fire truck there and, for an entire night, had hosed down the four houses. (A fortuitous change in the wind helped, too.)

After a catastrophic fire, speculation about “miracle homes” is almost irresistible. But the NIST case study showed that an observer can’t reliably decipher the reasons that certain houses survive by examining the dwellings alone. “Unless you have video footage and firsthand information, when you see a home that’s standing, you cannot say why,” Maranghides told me. In multiple studies of such disasters, his team has found that, on average, ninety per cent of damaged but standing houses were saved not so much by savvy design and construction choices but instead by firefighters’ actions.

As researchers have started to demystify fires in the so-called wildland-urban interface, or WUI (pronounced “wü-ē”), which are the middle ground between developed and undeveloped terrain, they have overturned a multitude of assumptions about why some houses burn and others do not. For example, homeowners often expect fires to spread from forests into residential areas via an advancing wall of flames. But experts long ago observed that wildland blazes throw off embers, which can soar on winds to ignite dwellings miles away.

Such revisions in the conventional wisdom force us to rethink how we protect ourselves. In the late twentieth century, fire agencies urged homeowners to replace flammable wooden shingles with alternatives such as Spanish tiles, which are made from non-combustible terra-cotta. But when Maranghides and his colleagues studied the 2007 Witch Creek Fire, in San Diego, their fieldwork and lab research indicated that embers frequently snuck beneath the terra-cotta, ignited dead leaves, and set underlying plywood alight. They concluded that embers were involved in starting fires in about two-thirds of the destroyed homes. (California’s building code now requires contractors to plug the gaps underneath curved tiles; some fixes for fires need fixing themselves.)

WUI conflagrations are wickedly complex, but scientists have been inching toward a sort of unified theory for prevention. In a 2022 report, Maranghides, his NIST colleagues, and co-authors at two partners, Cal Fire and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (I.B.H.S.), compiled all the known ways—upwards of fifty—by which embers, flames, or their radiant heat might set a house ablaze. It also outlined how property owners can retrofit entire neighborhoods to block every single ignition pathway. Roofs should be made from “Class A”-rated fire-protective materials; wall vents should be covered with fine wire mesh; eaves should be closed so that flammable beams aren’t exposed; windows should be made from double-paned tempered glass, which is less likely to shatter from heat. Something as simple as a seal around a garage door can keep embers out. Although such recommendations take time to trickle into state regulations, a number of them appeared in a building code that California enacted in 2008, Chapter 7A, which set unprecedented standards for new houses in the most fire-prone areas.

But the new paradigm for fighting these fires contains an inconvenient truth. Most people don’t live in new houses, and most building codes aren’t as strict as California’s. And so, for the large majority of the approximately fifty million U.S. homes in the WUI, fire prevention falls to individual homeowners—it’s voluntary and ad hoc. “The approach that has been taken for the last quarter century has been one of, ‘Hey, something is better than nothing,’ ” Maranghides told me. “And, from a fire perspective, that is absolutely not true. Fire doesn’t work that way.” A homeowner could complete eighty per cent of fire-protection measures, potentially spending many tens of thousands of dollars on retrofits, and lose their house because of the twenty per cent that remains unfinished—in no small part because of uncontrollable, unpredictable embers.

This reality has led Maranghides to a position so logical that it reminded me of Spock, the ultra-rational character from “Star Trek.” For homes to survive fire disasters on their own, he said, people who live on the boundary with wildlands should not only clear sources of fuel from around their properties but also make a hundred per cent of potential home-hardening improvements. Even these extraordinary measures, he went on, are insufficient. No home is an island, and dense housing developments can protect themselves only if every neighbor does the same work. Such recommendations are so stringent that they may seem impossible; some of Maranghides’s colleagues in the fire-prevention world worry that the message will deter the public from trying. “You cannot pick and choose,” Maranghides told me. “The science tells us you have to do everything.”

For much of the twentieth century, forest fires tended to threaten rural communities. Over time, a particular approach to fire prevention emerged: if your house sat on a spacious parcel in or near the woods, you could work to protect it by creating a buffer around it. In the sixties, a California law supported by the state’s fire agency advanced the foundational concept of defensible space, a zone of up to a hundred feet where fuels such as brush and trees are strategically trimmed back and managed. The U.S. Forest Service eventually recommended the practice. But, throughout the decades, housing developments crept toward wildlands, the climate warmed, and fires increasingly escalated into unstoppable urban conflagrations. In the past decade, California’s most destructive fires incinerated more than fifty-seven thousand homes, commercial properties, and other structures. And, when the nearest source of fuel is not the woods but, rather, the house next door, a broader strategy is needed. Houses had to be hardened to make them less likely to go up in flames.

This past spring, I visited Maranghides at the National Fire Research Laboratory, which studies hardening strategies in a hulking, warehouse-like structure on NIST’s campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Enormous ventilation pipes were coiled like snakes on the roof of the building. Maranghides, bespectacled and in jeans, met me in the vestibule, where we grabbed white hard hats. From there, we entered a cavernous room with a reinforced concrete floor. A roughly fifty-square-foot air-exhaust hood—an industrial version of what one finds in home kitchens—hung from the ceiling.

A dozen researchers were gathered around a mockup of a single-story dwelling. A beige façade made from cement fibreboard featured a double-pane slider window, an asphalt-composite shingle roof, and a metal gutter. It was designed to be highly fire-resistant, in keeping with Chapter 7A and the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code. (The house was like a stage set, with scaffolding where the other three walls would have been; sensors tracked metrics such as temperature and heat flux.) But all eyes were focussed on a small shed made from corrugated steel sitting five feet from the house. Its open door, facing the dwelling, revealed stacks of wood inside.

“Stand by for ignition,” a voice announced through a loudspeaker. A man in firefighting gear approached the shed, used a propane torch to set a fire, and walked away. Within minutes, an incandescent blaze was shooting out the door toward the wall. We could hear loud crackling; embers flew about. Soon, orange-red flames began to lick the wall and the roof’s open eaves. Smoke spiralled upward. The window frame, which was made from white vinyl, started melting and then ignited. Around ten minutes into the experiment, the eaves were burning. A glass window pane fell to the ground.

“Fire out!” a supervisor yelled. Firefighters doused the flames, generating clouds of steam.

“You see how quickly it happens?” Maranghides said. Even a hardened home has weaknesses—in this case, a flammable window frame and unclosed eaves—that can lead to failure. “Even 7A has significant limits,” he said. Many of NIST’s recommended retrofitting measures have not yet made it into WUI building codes.

The experiment that I witnessed was part of a series examining, in part, the role of sheds in fires. The researchers had also identified wooden gazebos, decks, mulch beds, recycling bins, play sets, cars, and R.V.s as crucial but overlooked sources of fuel. In the L.A. fires, such hazards helped fires hopscotch across neighboring lots, according to a rapid I.B.H.S. assessment. NIST recommendations increasingly address mutual dangers; a homeowner might place her gazebo at a minimum distance from her own home and that of her neighbor, and park her car in the garage.

Maranghides told me that the idea of defensible space has at times become part of the problem. On tight real-estate parcels, people may move sheds or firewood out to the property line—closer to the neighbor’s house. Attempting to create buffer zones in this way “does not work when you don’t have space,” he said. “It actually makes things worse.” While investigating the 2018 Camp Fire, he and his colleagues learned of a shed that went up in flames in a corner of a back yard, far from the owners’ four-bedroom stucco house. The blaze leaped to a nearby wooden fence and a neighbor’s shed, which exploded and injured a firefighter. Afterward, aerial photos showed the first residence still intact, but the neighbor’s home was rubble and ash. “Fire doesn’t care about who owns what,” Maranghides said.

Unfortunately, the communal nature of fire dangers isn’t always emphasized in the guides given to the public. While writing this story, I found that online advice often featured illustrations of a single abode on an isolated parcel. And, though Cal Fire’s home-hardening tips warned about “accessory buildings” and “miscellaneous structures” such as sheds, play sets, and R.V.s and explicitly cautioned against moving them next to neighboring residences, such issues were not mentioned on a wildfire-prevention webpage promoted by the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association (N.F.P.A.) and its educational program, Firewise USA.

The science shows that fire resilience can only be built in a coöperative way. “We need very, very significant, fundamental paradigm shifts in how we build, how we live, how we maintain,” Maranghides told me. But his uncompromising message on retrofitting may be difficult to hear. “It’s much better to ‘do everything’ if you can,” Alexandra Syphard, a senior research scientist who studies wildfires at the Oregon-based nonprofit Conservation Biology Institute, told me. But “the message that one could take from that statement is that, ‘Oh, well, I can’t afford to do everything. Therefore, I’m going to do nothing.’ ” Stephen Quarles, a former I.B.H.S. scientist who co-authored the 2022 NIST report, agreed with Maranghides that the eighty-twenty rule of disaster preparedness doesn’t work on wildfires. But “it can be discouraging to emphasize that,” he said. Quarles favors giving homeowners a shorter, tailored list of the most important retrofits to prioritize, and then work through other items down the line. “They can sort of bite them off in manageable chunks,” he said.

The essential dilemma is that there are no quick or simple fixes for making millions of older homes fire-safe—and few levers for forcing owners to take on the challenge. Voluntary retrofitting can be more productive than imposing an unpopular mandate, Michele Steinberg, the wildfire director at N.F.P.A., said. “We’ve had to walk that line,” she said. “How much is too much to ask people before they throw up their hands and say, ‘We don’t want to do this’? And how much is not enough?” The N.F.P.A. recently argued for public policies that would require every building in the WUI, even old ones, to be fire-resistant. But, right now, neighbors must volunteer just one hour per household per year to maintain a Firewise community group; the designation may earn them discounts on California home insurance. “We need to push for much better,” Steinberg acknowledged. “But how, in our cultural context, do we get it done?”

It’s difficult to imagine a nationwide solution for WUI fires that doesn’t include vast investments in home hardening by the federal and state government. This would require political will and buy-in from homeowners. “The long game is really the goal,” Maranghides told me. The public needed a generation to accept automobile seat belts and tornado shelters; new safety standards had to be met with changes in the culture. “All these things, they take time to move through society,” Maranghides went on. He worries about how many more homes will burn before people are protected.

California remains vulnerable to devastating fires, but recent developments there help one imagine the path toward a more comprehensive and communal fire-prevention strategy. A controversial state law will soon mandate that combustible materials be cleared out of the five-foot perimeter around any dwelling in fire-prone neighborhoods. (The rules, which are known as “Zone Zero” regulations, could be finalized this year.) Meanwhile, a more holistic experiment called the California Wildfire Mitigation Program (C.W.M.P.), a hundred-and-seventeen-million-dollar pilot initiative, is aiming to harden about two thousand homes across six low-to-moderate-income communities. Largely funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it aims to simplify the home-hardening process, and its minimum quality standards incorporate NIST’s 2022 guidance and Zone Zero measures. More than seventy dwellings have been completed so far.

These efforts may offer a preview of what countless neighborhoods will eventually face. Jose de Jesus (J.) Lopez, the executive director of the C.W.M.P. Authority, told me that the program’s maximum retrofitting budget tends to fall between sixty thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars per home. At that price, he said, “perfection”—as in, full retrofitting—“is very hard to achieve.” Susanne Bach, who lives in a hilly community in Kelseyville, California, told me that a local nonprofit spruced up her family home with funding from C.W.M.P. and her county. Unfortunately, six-foot-tall brush is growing in undeveloped lots nearby. If it ignites, wind could drive embers onto their roof—which isn’t fire-resistant and wasn’t within the scope of the upgrades. Then, Bach fears, “all that work we did isn’t going to matter.”

In August, 2024, Kate and Michael, a retired couple in Oakland, California, learned their home-insurance policy was being cancelled; their ridgetop neighborhood is largely surrounded by regional parkland that is at high risk of fire. A representative from the insurer referred them to a voluntary home-hardening program that certifies residences as “wildfire prepared.” (The requirements, which were developed by the I.B.H.S., include most of the recommendations from NIST.) If they were certified within ninety days, their policy might be renewed. “There’s no way we could do that,” Michael told me in a phone call.

They obtained coverage from another insurer. Then, anxious about losing their insurance again this summer, they spent about fifteen thousand dollars on improvements to their residence—which already had a metal roof, double-paned windows, and ember-blocking wall vents. They put in new metal gutter covers and ripped out fire-prone rosemary bushes. They removed nearly all plants from their Zone Zero perimeter and swapped out mulch for gray gravel. They replaced two wooden gates that were attached to the house with stylish black metal ones.

At one point, I told Kate and Michael about NIST’s rigorous retrofitting philosophy, and I e-mailed them a link to the C.W.M.P.’s standards. The next time we spoke, Kate sounded deflated. “There’s just a lot,” she said. “It always comes back to, ‘Well, do you want your house to burn?’ I don’t. Am I supposed to put another hundred thousand in it that I don’t have?”

“It’s so overwhelming to everybody,” Michael said. “And then your immediate reaction is, ‘Screw it, I’m not gonna do anything.’ ”

A few days later, on a bright May afternoon, I drove up to their one-story house, which had a stucco front exterior in a pleasant yellow hue. Wind chimes rang out in the back yard, which brimmed with pointy succulents, low-lying shrubs, and a few small trees. The couple showed me major retrofits that they were still aiming to address. They had to decide what to do with their tropical-hardwood decks, and whether to upgrade some old siding. They’d found online resources that gave conflicting information on the best way to close their open roof eaves, which was frustrating. And did they need to move two small plastic storage sheds that sat against the house?

Kate and Michael have been helping to start a local Firewise group, but recruitment is slow. I asked them whether they could imagine working with neighbors to address potential hazards such as sheds and gazebos. “It feels impossible,” Kate said. “All we can do is educate on what are the risks. But you can’t tell people what to do, right?” They are in their seventies; standing in their driveway, they told me that it will take several years to do all the retrofitting they can afford. “I think we’ve learned to take it in chunks,” Kate said. “Get some stuff done, and then take a little break. Reëvaluate everything with new information that comes along.” In mid-June, they were relieved to learn that their home insurance would be renewed—but their annual premium was going up by a thousand dollars. ♦

The so-called desktop first appeared on a home computer in 1981, with the release of the Xerox 8010 Star Information System. That device pioneered the graphical-user interface, or G.U.I., a convenient series of visual metaphors that allows us to interact more easily with our machines. The most basic computing interface is the command-line prompt, the empty box in which users write instructions in code directly to the machine; the Xerox Star replaced that forbidding vacuum with a friendly illustration of a tabletop surface, textured in patterned pixels, scattered with icons for folders, spreadsheets, and filing trays. A 1982 paper on the device described the then novel system: “Users are encouraged to think of the objects on the Desktop in physical terms. You can move the icons around to arrange your Desktop as you wish. (Messy Desktops are certainly possible, just as in real life.)” That mess derives from the files that we scatter on our desktops, agglomerations of data in formats that read as increasingly arcane and anachronistic: PDFs, JPGs, ZIPs, M4As. Similar to a physical desk drawer, the desktop is now something that we tend to stuff full and then forget about.

Over the past decade of computing, the desktop has receded. Digital-file systems have gone the way of the IRL inbox tray. Instead, we use the search bar to call up any file that we might want to find or tap apps that provide self-contained, streamlined experiences for consuming or producing content. Our phone home screens are even less customizable and less idiosyncratic than our computer desktops; we rarely think of individual files existing on our phones. Apple recently launched an iPhone operating-system interface redesign called Liquid Glass that turns its icons translucent, further homogenizing their appearance. Even such icons may soon be a thing of the past. The promise of artificial intelligence is that the desktop will disappear entirely and users will only interact with a chatbot or a voice that will carry out their bidding through plain language alone, morphing the entire computer into an anthropomorphized character. No mess there, just A.I. efficiency.

Amid the accelerating automation of our computers—and the proliferation of assistants and companions and agents designed to execute tasks for us—I’ve been thinking more about the desktop that’s hidden in the background of the laptop I use every day. Mine is strewn with screenshots and Word documents and e-books. What I’ve accrued the most of by far, though, are TextEdit files, from the bare-bones Mac app that just lets you type stuff into a blank window. Apple computers have come with text-editing software since the original Mac was released, in 1984; the current iteration of the program launched in the mid-nineties and has survived relatively unchanged. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. Those files are stored as RTFs (short for rich-text format), one step up from the most basic TXT file. TextEdit now functions as my to-do-list app, my e-mail drafting window, my personal calendar, and my stash of notes to self, which act like digital Post-its.

I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen. I could make lists on actual paper, of course, but I’ve also found that my brain has been so irredeemably warped by keyboards that I can only really get my thoughts down by typing. (Apparently my internal monologue takes place in Arial typeface, fourteen-point font.)

TextEdit is software that does what it says on the box. Its app icon features a sheet of lined paper. The writing window has an anachronistic measuring rule in the header with customizable margins, though I’ve never printed a TextEdit file. That kind of skeuomorphism—the design of a digital interface to resemble a physical one, by, for example, adding a faux-metal texture to a calculator app—has been out of fashion for more than a decade, ever since Apple moved away from it in the early twenty-tens. But the literalist sensibility is coming back into vogue as A.I. destabilizes our technological interactions once more and causes us to search for new metaphors to govern our digital lives. Earlier this year, Airbnb launched a heavily skeuomorphic redesign, swapping its buttons for tiny animated renderings of real-life objects: a slant-roofed home, for rentals; a hot-air balloon, for “experiences”; and a concierge bell, for services. The message of the interface is, Trust our software; it will deliver exactly what it promises. In practice, though, Airbnb’s offerings remain quite opaque, and driven by algorithmic recommendations that try to anticipate the user’s desires.

We users have learned that cloud-based apps and digital platforms are more likely to surveil us, mine our data, and manipulate our attention than to provide us the precise content and services we seek. Companies are trying to combat that accumulated sense of distrust in various other ways. This month, the A.I. company Anthropic tried to give itself a friendlier, more physical face by hosting a pop-up at a West Village storefront which it reportedly dubbed a “zero slop zone.” Attendees received free baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking”—never mind that the product the company puts forward is supposed to do the thinking for you. Pinterest, the source of many complaints about A.I. images, has allowed users to minimize A.I. content in search results, and iPhones include a setting that disables Apple Intelligence features. The best way to reclaim our digital experiences, though, might be to stick with the likes of TextEdit, software that is unable to do anything except follow our commands. ♦

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Henri Cole joins Kevin Young to read “Vita Nova,” by Louise Glück, and his own poem “Figs.” Cole is the author of many poetry collections, including “The Other Love.” He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of honors such as the Thom Gunn Award and the Jackson Poetry Prize.

One of the most famous cuts in cinema history, from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” perfectly captures a concept known as the technological sublime. First, we see an angry ape bludgeoning one of his fellows to death with a scavenged bone; he’s only just discovered that bones can be used this way, and he hurls his weapon into the air in celebration. We follow the bone upward as it tumbles against the unpolluted blue sky. Then, suddenly, we cut to outer space, millions of years in the ape’s future. The bone has been replaced by an elegant satellite, floating past the curve of the Earth. Over the next few minutes, as a ship docks with a space station, we see just how far humanity has come.

If you’ve encountered any science fiction, you’ve experienced the technological sublime—the feeling of awe, braided with dread, that can emerge in response to the engulfing possibilities of technology’s progress. Maybe you’ve gaped at the sprawling cyber-cityscapes of “Blade Runner,” or at the impossibly tall, leaflike alien ships in “Arrival.” In the cascading green code of “The Matrix,” you might have sensed a promise of revelation—or perhaps Ava, the uncannily beautiful android played by Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina,” has induced some idea of what it might mean to be more than human. In all of these cases, technology feels big, strange, relentless, but also mind-expanding and appealing—a bracing wave that will sweep you up.

These are fantasies about an as-yet-unrealized future. But the technological sublime exists in our world, too. Decades ago, when I was in elementary school, we watched the space shuttle take off from Cape Canaveral, agog at the power of its rockets even on our classroom’s small TV. Today, crowds gather to witness towering SpaceX boosters return to Earth, where they’re caught by giant mechanical arms. Rocketry comes across as futuristic, but actually the modern version of it is a hundred years old—and so, when we thrill to it, we thrill not to a fantasy but to a fact of life. When I walk to The New Yorker’s offices, in One World Trade Center, I often crane my head to trace the building’s facets as they flow upward to its spire. Such architecture evokes a city of the future, but it exists in the here and now, and the innovations that make it possible—steel skeletons and curtain walls, H.V.A.C. systems and elevators—stretch back to the nineteenth century. We live, and have lived for a long time, in a high-tech age.

“The sublime” is an old concept. It denotes, at minimum, an especially transporting kind of aesthetic experience, perhaps the highest kind. The writer of “On the Sublime,” a two-thousand-year-old Greek text, associated it with an immortal literary greatness—the sort conjured by a phrase like “Let there be light.” In the eighteenth century, the concept took a turn, when philosophers connected it to the natural world. In a seminal treatise, “A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” Edmund Burke distinguished between two kinds of aesthetic experience: a pleasing, unintimidating sort of beauty (think of a flower, or a poem), and a scarier kind of beauty, which we might face when we stand before a roaring waterfall or an endless expanse of desert. The waterfall and the desert dwarf us; they’re indifferent to us; they could kill us. Yet we find them sublime, as long as we can appreciate their power from a safe remove. The experience of sublimity, Burke wrote, is “not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.” The sublime invokes in us “astonishment,” he went on, and also “awe, reverence, and respect.”

Compared to the natural version of the sublime, the technological one has always felt a little cheap. The historian Perry Miller, who first definitively described the technological sublime, in the nineteen-sixties, saw it as a specifically American phenomenon. Our national devotion to capitalism and industry had combined with our moral fervor, he argued, to create a civic religion based on awe-inspiring technological masterworks. One downside of worshipping technologies, of course, is that, unlike traditional sacred objects, they grow obsolete, even quaint, as they age. Miller wrote that the steamboat once provoked feelings of technological sublimity: it was “a subject of ecstasy for its sheer majesty and might, especially for its stately progress at night, blazing with light through the swamps and forests of Nature.” Today, it’s a ride at Disney World.

In “The Machine in the Garden,” from 1964, Leo Marx showed how, as the country grew, the “rhetoric of the technological sublime” had papered over objections to new technology. It had allowed techno-optimists to argue that there was a spiritual dimension—an elevation—to the thoroughness with which industrialization would intrude upon a long-cherished vision of a pastoral America. Thirty years later, in “American Technological Sublime,” David E. Nye explored the everyday ways in which we worship technology—factory tours; spectacular concerts with light shows; observation decks at the tops of skyscrapers—and celebrated its democratic nature. We’re all distant from God, but we can ride in jets, own iPhones, get mRNA vaccines, and talk with ChatGPT. Many of the most extraordinary technologies are available to everyone.

Yet when it comes to technology, is the word “sublime” really the right one? When new technologies inspire awe and fear, are those sensations legitimate? Or are they just products of sci-fi fanboyism or corporate boosterism, ginned up by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and other tech moguls who want to convince us that smartphones, household robots, or neural interfaces are the second coming? All this seems possible—and yet the technological sublime can still feel like an authentic response to the world we live in, which is shaped by technology on every level, in ways we struggle to imagine or control.

It’s tempting to say that technology isn’t natural—that it’s made by us—and that this is a fundamental way in which the technological sublime differs from the natural kind. But there’s a point of view from which technology isn’t entirely man-made. In “Oppenheimer,” everyone feels awe and dread at the prospect of the atomic bomb. The sources of dread are obvious. Awe rides along within the fascinations of physics. The bomb is made possible through human insights into the nature of reality; fission’s power to end everything emerges from our newly achieved understanding of how everything is made. Nature and humanity mingle, and this is part of what inspires astonishment.

It’s possible to take this line of thought further, and to say that there’s something autonomous about technology—that it plays a role in its own creation. In an influential essay, “What Technology Wants,” Kevin Kelly describes the sum total of our technical systems as “the technium” and argues that this “organism-like” assemblage has “tendencies.” “We humans want certain things from the technium, but at the same time there is an inherent bias in the technium outside of our wants,” Kelly writes. For one thing, “technology will head in certain directions because physics, mathematics, and realities of innovation constrain possibilities”; for another, technology itself tends to develop in ways that increase efficiency, “evolvability,” and other useful qualities. For these reasons, Kelly argues, if we were to visit alien civilizations, we’d probably find that they possessed at least some similar technologies: “Any civilization that invents nuclear power,” for instance, “will hit upon a small set of workable solutions.” In this sense, technology is not simply something we invent; it’s also like a territory that we explore. It’s full of phenomena—like the atom bomb—that are inevitably going to be discovered.

There’s a twistiness to the natural version of the sublime. We want to encounter reality, but safely. By standing behind the guardrail, we can appreciate the power of Niagara Falls as an aesthetic matter, while if we were in the flow and headed for the drop, we’d feel only terror. Technological sublimity, similarly, requires guardrails. These can be both substantive—we watch auto racing from behind barriers—and intellectual. By understanding our technologies, we learn to control them, making them safer. And yet a technology that’s completely controlled lacks a sublime thrill. Driving was once technologically sublime: Americans were so in love with internal-combustion vehicles that the Beach Boys could write songs about them, and it was exciting to be a mechanic, to learn the ins and outs of the always-evolving automobile. It could even be glamorous to die in a car crash, as in the teen-tragedy songs of the nineteen-fifties and sixties (“Leader of the Pack,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” “Tell Laura I Love Her,” and so on). Now driving is boring. The new sublime is in driverless cars. You feel awe and dread when you take your hands off the wheel.

The inevitable progress of technology, in other words, makes the technological sublime elusive. And it’s also true that technologies tend to shrink themselves, taking on unassuming guises. (“Technologies tend toward ubiquity and cheapness,” Kelly writes.) My son and I sometimes throw around a “hoverball”—a little propeller-powered sphere that glows in the dark, and which can be made to float elegantly from person to person, or to follow a boomerang route. The hoverball is fun, not sublime, and yet technological sublimity hides inside it: the flight systems within the hoverball are related to the ones that have created deadly “gray zones” on the Ukrainian battlefield, into which no human can venture without risking death by drone.

Standing on the beach at night, staring out at the dark, mysterious ocean, it’s easy to feel challenged by something much larger and older than yourself. The natural sublime is big, ostentatious, unmistakable. With technology, such moments can sneak up on you. Every once in a while, you might catch a glimpse of a security camera in the corner of a room, and recall that we are always being watched. Spotting a satellite drifting across the night sky, you might think about how our species’ reach is extending; taking your daily statin, you might consider how engineered our bodies are. In this way, the technological sublime can be a diffuse feeling, encountered in fragments. If you’re a technophile, it’s something you might pursue, by always chasing the frontier.

Technologists are rational—at least, that’s the idea. But they’re also people, and people live in culture and have emotions, and the patterns through which those emotions are experienced have been largely the same since the time of Edmund Burke. Listen to the titans of tech talk about what they do, and you’ll often notice the patterns of the technological sublime. A.I. researchers at the “frontier labs,” for instance, speak in sombre tones about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, which they believe is a sort of fated discovery, almost a potentiality of the universe, to which they are nearly witnesses. The fact that they aren’t entirely in control of these systems seems to heighten their sense of being in the presence of something sublime.

Sublimity involves an element of passivity. Once, I set out for a walk by myself in Red Rock Canyon, in Nevada; it was more than a hundred degrees outside, and the sun was blinding. Standing on a lonely stretch of path overlooking a ravine, with no one around and my water bottle empty, I realized the riskiness of what I’d done. I should’ve headed back immediately, but instead I stood, taking in the ancient rust-colored canyon, feeling both in over my head and very alive. The world was big, and didn’t care about me, and yet there I was, understanding this fact. I enjoyed the mixture of wonder and fear.

But is this how we should respond to technology? The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was fascinated by the moment when a scary experience becomes sublime; it’s almost, he thought, as though we face a choice between worrying about ourselves or transcending selfhood. Take the latter path, toward sublimity, and one becomes a “pure, will-less subject of knowing,” an “eternal subject”—a person who experiences “exaltation” at having ascended out of themselves. This sounds terribly abstract, but it’s a good description of what it feels like to stand in awe and fear of something bigger than you. People who pursue the sublime in nature—mountaineers, scuba divers, and the like—are often on the hunt for it.

Sublimity isn’t an illusion. There are reasons we feel it out in nature, and reasons we experience the technological version, too. Yet in both cases, it’s important to break the trance. At some point, you have to flee from the oncoming wave. You have to return to yourself—to remember, and embrace, the fact that you’re a particular person with agency, obligations, and values. In the natural world, returning to yourself can be as simple as walking away. But, in the technological one, it’s more complicated, because we’re in charge of the pace of exploration, discovery, and invention. Technologists can, to some degree, conjure the technological sublime, and consumers of technology can become addicted to it. But the path to responsibility leads through disenchantment. ♦